2017 a deadly year on Big Island roads

Obvious as it sounds, that’s the lesson to be learned from the majority of the 32 official traffic fatalities that occurred on Hawaii Island in 2017 — the same official total of traffic deaths that took place in 2016. The deaths occurred in 30 collisions.

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“I will point out our speed-related fatalities went up drastically,” Sgt. Robert Pauole of the Hawaii Police Department’s Traffic Services Division said Wednesday. “Our speeding-related fatalities for 2017 are 18, compared to seven in 2016.”

Speed-related crashes include the deadliest of the year, a two-car collision that took three lives. It happened May 17 on Queen Kaahumanu Highway (Route 19) about a mile north of Ellison Onizuka Kona International Airport.

Police say a northbound 1998 Toyota 4Runner passed several vehicles. After passing the final car, the driver lost control, veered back into the oncoming southbound lane and broadsided a 2008 Nissan Titan pickup truck.

Both occupants of the 4Runner, Hector Alfredo Barrientos Vigil and Obdulio Eliseo Garcia Orellana, 33-year-old Captain Cook men originally from Guatemala, were killed. So was the Titan’s driver, 37-year-old Hailame Lavaka of Waimea.

Lavaka’s 32-year-old wife, Alana, was critically injured.

May was a particularly deadly month on Big Island roads, with 10 unofficial and nine official traffic fatalities.

“A number of our fatalities this year were because of people driving recklessly, passing when there’s double-solid lines, around bends and (causing) head-on collisions,” Pauole said. “I know there was the one on Saddle Road where the individual was passing on the curve, and as he came around that bend, he went head-on with a vehicle. He was passing in a double-solid line area. I believe there were also two fatalities in the Hamakua District where it was the same, passing where there’s a double-solid line and a head-on collision.”

The Oct. 14 crash on Saddle Road, also known as Daniel K. Inouye Highway, killed 49-year-old Napoleon Higuera of Hilo, who was driving west in a 2001 Dodge Caravan and overtaking vehicles when he collided with an eastbound 2015 Honda Fit.

The two Hamakua crashes Pauole referred to were on June 7 and Dec. 2, and both occurred on Hawaii Belt Road (Highway 11) in Paauilo.

In the first, 32-year-old Jacob De Jesus of Paauilo was killed when his Hilo-bound sedan crossed the centerline and collided head-on with a dump truck near the 37-mile marker. His car was pushed backward into a Jeep Wrangler. The drivers of those vehicles suffered minor injuries and refused medical treatment.

A 37-year-old Papaaloa woman, Lori Ann Sato, was killed in the second collision when, driving north, she overtook a vehicle in a no-passing zone near the 34-mile marker in her 2004 Honda sedan and was broadsided by a southbound 1999 Toyota pickup.

A passenger in the pickup, a 21-year-old Pepeekeo man, was treated and released at North Hawaii Community Hospital for his injuries. The driver, a 20-year-old Pepeekeo man, wasn’t injured. Sato wasn’t wearing a seat belt; both pickup truck occupants were.

Although the official total is 32, 36 lives were actually claimed by vehicles last year on Hawaii Island, two more than in 2016. Two of those deaths occurred on a private road or private property, and two within the boundaries of Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

In one of those HVNP crashes, 48-year-old John Ashley Becker of Texas was killed and another man injured May 28 when the driver of a Toyota Tacoma pickup truck they were passengers in rolled over on Volcano Highway (Highway 11) near the 33-mile marker.

The driver, 43-year-old Kenneth Ewing of Pahoa, had a blood-alcohol content of 0.312, almost four times the legal DUI threshold of 0.08.

Police made 1,160 DUI arrests in 2017, compared to 1,111 in 2016, an increase of 4.4 percent.

By district, Kona led the way in DUI arrests, by far, with 521. Puna was next, with 276, followed by South Hilo with 254, South Kohala with 69, Ka‘u with 20, Hamakua with nine, North Kohala with six and North Hilo with five.

There were 1,362 major accidents — those that caused $3,000 or more in damage — in 2017, compared to 1,443 during the same period last year, a decrease of 5.6 percent.

The worst year for fatalities in recent memory was 2012, when police tallied 38 official traffic deaths. The numbers had steadily declined until 2016, leaving Pauole and other traffic enforcers “perplexed.”

“It might be understandable going up by a few or even down by a few, but when you jump from a low number — 2015 was 19, 2014 was 11, now, all of a sudden, we’re jumping up into the 30s,” Pauole said. “Those are big numbers and the department is definitely concerned.

“As far as a solution, I don’t have any. From a police standpoint, we’re doing exactly the same thing we’ve been doing all these years. Our speeding enforcement, our DUI enforcement, are all consistently the same, if not more than previous years. I think, at this point, people just need to take it upon themselves to drive safer, take it upon themselves to drive with aloha.”